How Trump’s Culture War Derailed a New Smithsonian Museum

Ever since President Trump started playing armchair museum curator last year, the White House has employed a number of strategies to try to influence exhibitions at the Smithsonian. It has sent threatening letters, published a memo that reads like an exhibit hit list, and even resorted to an occasional bit of online trolling.The Smithsonian has certainly undergone a small number of changes as a result of the pressure, but compared with, say, the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, it has shown that it is not so easily breached. Yesterday, however, House Republicans appeared poised to push forward a different strategy on behalf of the president: bake Trump’s influence into a Smithsonian museum before it’s even built.Their target, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Act, was originally simple. It permitted the transfer of land on the National Mall to the Smithsonian for construction, and it had more than 200 bipartisan co-sponsors. But in March, GOP lawmakers added an amendment giving Trump final authority over the museum’s location and prohibiting the institution from including transgender women.[Read: A cautious new approach to Trump’s impeachments at the Smithsonian]At a hearing this week, Representative Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, a Republican, said that the changes had been made with the “technical assistance” of the White House. Democrats noted the irony of a man—the president of the United States—potentially having so much control over a place dedicated to telling women’s stories. (The White House did not respond to a request for further details on its involvement.)When the amended bill went up for a vote in the House yesterday, it flopped. Six Republicans opposed the legislation alongside 210 Democrats. Those six Republicans, all men, seemed to object to the idea of the women’s-history museum in general; three of the four who had been in office in 2020 had voted against the original bill that intended to establish it.Now the